Video Ad Fraud: The 2025 Playbook to Protect CTV, YouTube, and Programmatic Video Budgets

Video ad fraud has quietly become one of the costliest drains on modern media plans—especially where the money is juiciest: Connected TV (CTV), YouTube, in-stream and in-feed video, and auto-optimized formats like Performance Max. The problem isn’t just the wasted impressions. Fraud contaminates the signals that ad platforms use to “learn,” so your targeting, bidding, and creative optimizations drift further from real customers over time.

Across the industry, measurement bodies classify illegitimate activity as Invalid Traffic (IVT), split into GIVT (general, easy-to-filter) and SIVT (sophisticated, harder to catch). You’ll see IVT show up as hijacked sessions via server-side ad insertion (SSAI), spoofed devices and apps, domain/app spoofing, stacked or hidden video ads, bot farms generating “viewable” impressions, and fake audiences that never had a chance to convert in the first place. The Media Rating Council’s IVT standards underpin how vendors measure and filter this traffic, but fraudsters continually adapt, targeting channels with high CPMs and loose transparency—CTV and streaming video among them.

Recent data shows why video needs special attention. Global programmatic IVT rates in Q2 2025 ran ~18% on CTV, ~19% on web, and ~29% in mobile apps—CTV is far from immune despite “big screen” assumptions. And when SSAI is used to stitch ads into streams, IVT rates can spike dramatically. According to Pixalate’s Q1 2024 SSAI report, IVT on CTV was 140% higher when SSAI was present, and transparency around SSAI implementations fell across regions—conditions that fraud rings love to exploit. Meanwhile, verification labs report new fraud families and variants migrating toward CTV and streaming audio, fueled by cheap generative AI and large profit incentives; unprotected advertisers have seen fraud/SIVT violation rates crest into the high-teens.

If you run video, here’s the practical guide to protect your budget and fix the data your optimizations depend on.

What is video ad fraud? Core tactics in 2025

• SSAI abuse and session hijacking. Fraudsters spoof or hijack real device sessions so ad servers think they’re showing on legitimate CTV devices. Early examples like SneakyTerra showed how SSAI can be weaponized at scale.
• App/domain spoofing. Inventory is misrepresented to look like premium apps or publishers; buyers pay top CPMs for non-existent or low-quality supply. MRC and IAB push standards like app-ads.txt, ads.txt, and ads.cert 2.0 to harden this surface.
• Ad stacking and hidden video. Multiple video ads are layered or hidden off-screen, creating “viewable” events with no humans watching. Vastflux, a major operation, stacked up to 25 video ads per slot and spoofed 1,700 apps.
• Legacy tag exploits. VPAID/legacy player behaviors and lax VAST enforcement can enable measurement and injection tricks, though the ecosystem continues to shift toward VAST 4.x with OM SDK for standardized measurement.

The state of video ad fraud now: CTV, SSAI, and mobile video

• CTV is lucrative and targeted. Programmatic CTV draws premium CPMs, and IVT tracks near one-in-five globally. Fraud labs report a steady rise of novel schemes, with generative AI accelerating the pace of variants.
• SSAI doubles the risk when opaque. In Q1 2024, IVT on SSAI traffic was 140% higher than non-SSAI; safety improved when SSAI implementations were transparent.
• Mobile video is a soft target for app spoofing and stacking. Cases like Vastflux illustrate how malicious JavaScript and spoofing can flood exchanges with bogus video inventory.

According to Spider AF's 2025 Ad Fraud White Paper, the average ad fraud rate across advertisers reached 5.1% in 2024, with estimated global losses of $37.7B, and some companies seeing up to 51.8% of budgets impacted.

Why video ad fraud wrecks your data and ROAS

Fraudulent video impressions and invalid clicks poison platform learning loops. Optimizers like Performance Max or video action campaigns consume fake signals, steering budgets toward the very pockets of supply causing the problem. In Spider AF’s 2024 dataset, invalid activity strongly correlated with lower downstream performance: valid clicks converted at roughly 2x the rate of invalid ones, underscoring how cleaning traffic improves real conversions. According to Spider AF's 2025 Ad Fraud White Paper, valid clicks converted at ~2.54% vs. 1.29% for invalid clicks.

12 practical defenses for YouTube, CTV, and programmatic video

1. Enforce supply transparency. Require ads.txt and app-ads.txt; prefer sellers with ads.cert 2.0 adoption to cryptographically authenticate supply paths.
2. Demand SSAI transparency. Ask for SSAI disclosure and measurable device/session identifiers. Avoid opaque SSAI endpoints that correlate with higher IVT.
3. Upgrade to VAST 4.x + OM SDK. Ensure partners support the latest VAST addendum for Advanced TV and Open Measurement for consistent, verifiable video metrics.
4. Use curated deals and PMPs for CTV. Favor direct relationships with premium apps and verified SSPs to reduce spoofing exposure.
5. Tighten geo and device filters. Out-of-market or non-human device spikes are classic SIVT signatures. Monitor for bursts on new device models and OS versions.
6. Block MFA and low-quality placements. Combine verification with placement exclusion lists; Spider AF surfaces and blocks MFA categories in automated and manual workflows.
7. Set frequency caps and session controls. Extreme frequency on “new” devices is a red flag for SSAI farms.
8. Protect the landing experience. Malvertising and tag injections can distort post-click data. Spider AF SiteScan monitors client-side scripts, flags tampering, and aligns with PCI DSS v4.0.1 client-side security expectations.
9. Automate invalid click blocking. For video campaigns that drive clicks to site or app, Spider AF PPC Protection sends hourly IP and audience exclusions to Google Ads and social platforms to stop known abusers.
10. Audit bidstream anomalies. Watch for impossible viewability, perfect completion rates, or identical user-agents across swaths of traffic.
11. Use independent verification. Prefer MRC-accredited SIVT detection for CTV and mobile app environments.
12. Continuously retrain exclusions. Fraud shifts weekly. Tools that auto-refresh blocklists outperform static IP/app lists.

How Spider AF plugs in today

• PPC Protection: Detects and blocks invalid clicks, enforces placement exclusions, and protects auto-optimization from polluted signals across Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, and more.
• SiteScan: Always-on script monitoring to catch tag tampering and data exfiltration that can skew attribution or expose users—timely as PCI DSS v4.0.1 brings client-side mandates.

FAQs

Is CTV safer than web video?

It’s different, not safer. CTV’s premium CPMs attract spoofing and SSAI abuse; global CTV IVT sits near 18%, and SSAI can elevate risk when opaque.

Are legacy VPAID units risky?

VPAID enabled interactivity but also opened doors for mismeasurement and manipulation. The ecosystem is standardizing on VAST 4.x + OM SDK to close gaps.

What are real-world examples of video ad fraud?

Operations like Vastflux stacked dozens of video ads per slot and spoofed apps; earlier SSAI hijacks like SneakyTerra show how CTV sessions can be abused.

Conclusion: Fix the signals, then scale

Video ad fraud steals budget and, worse, sabotages your optimization feedback loop. Clean traffic first, then let your smart bidding and creatives compoundingly improve.

• Start blocking invalid clicks and bad placements with Spider AF PPC Protection to keep YouTube and video-driven site traffic clean: https://spideraf.com/ppc-protection
• If you manage forms, payment pages, or heavy tag stacks, run a SiteScan to detect script tampering that warps attribution and exposes customer data: https://spideraf.com/sitescan

Try Spider AF free to see what you’ve been paying for—and what you can safely cut.